Ethnohistorical Description of the Eight Villages Adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Interpretive Themes of History and Heritage (2 Volumes)

Impact Assessment, Inc.

This document results from a three-year long research project funded by the National Park Service beginning in 2002 to conduct an ethnohistorical and ethnographic study of eight communities adjacent to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CAHA). This study grew out of the National Park Service’s recognition of the importance of understanding the social, cultural, and economic histories of communities affected by its policies and actions; its purpose was to “support the Park in the interpretation of its cultural resources, stewardship of ethnographic sources within the Park, and in community relations with these Park neighbors.” Research methods included participant-observation in Hatteras and Ocracoke villages, social mapping, genealogical interviews, and extended, tape-recorded interviews of community elders and leaders. We also built upon interviews of residents who born before or near the turn of the century that were recorded in the 1970s and 1980s by National Park Service staff as part of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Project. In some cases we were able to interview the children of those interviewed in earlier decades, now deceased. These interviews helped us formulate a diachronic description of social and cultural change in Outer Bank villages, particularly relating to the interpretive themes of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: seashore living and fishing economy. The final document is divided into three main components: • A description of contemporary life on the Outer Banks, including demographic changes, challenges and issues faced by traditional banker communities, and a discussion of the role of the National Park Service in villager life (Chapter 6). This section includes a discussion of management issues and recommendations. • An ethnohistorical description of the eight villages adjoining Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, Hatteras, and Ocracoke. This is the main body of the text, and includes an overall history of Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands (Chapter 5), as well as specific ethnohistories of the six other villages (Chapter 7), and is based primarily on recorded interviews. • Interpretive themes of history and heritage. This section offers information pertaining to ten interpretive themes identified by National Park Service staff. The purpose of this section is to provide a reference guide for Park interpreters who are developing programs about the cultural meanings of artifacts, places, or events in Banker history. We have included as much primary source information for each of these themes as possible, and included secondary source references as well. In addition to the main document described above, we have compiled the oral histories recorded and transcribed for this project in a separate document. These interviews will be made available to National Park personnel as well as the public. They should be studied in conjunction with the interviews from the 1970s and 1980s conducted by National Park staff and Southern Oral History Project researchers. These interviews are file at the History Center in Manteo, and at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore headquarters in Manteo. Also useful to any research of Outer Banks culture and history is an annotated bibliography of coastal research compiled by Betty Duggan (2001), which was undertaken as a precursor to this project.